Falling in Love with Auto Focus

Wow, discovering whole new capabilities of my camera! This lesson I’ve discovered how to use single auto focus and what a difference jt makes to my photos! I can even occasionally get some halfway decent photos indoors, certainly reducing the amount of blurriness!:) Couldn’t find any way to do continuous or automatic auto focus (camera is a finepix S3300)

Pie- Light on my boy’s face as he manfully tries to finish off the lemon meringue.
Siblings – Captured a special sibling moment on recent travels. Not too sure if it is too pale? But first time I’ve been able to take a photo in the car and it not be blurry thanks to autofocus.
Cousins – Very happy with the light and balance in this pic. Didn’t even crop, played with doing so in the foreground but it took away some of the effect
Grown Cousins – Not only a special moment capturing these grown and semi-grown cousins, but I like the lines of symmetry. The line of cousins, the line of the fence behind, the treetops behind.

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2 Comments

Hi Erin, I’m glad your enjoying single auto focus and feel like it’s helping. And it will get better and better the more you practice it. I have downloaded many of the common camera user manuals so I’ll have a look for you to see if there are equivalent settings to continuous or automatic auto focus on the Finepix S3300. If there is anything I’ll post another comment here. If you haven’t already tick “Notify me of follow-up comments by email” below to make sure you don’t miss it.
Now to some feedback on your images. These are fairly minor but important to keep in mind to improve your photography.
* Image 1: This would have had more impact if you’d been down lower. At his level or even lower. A good rule of thumb when photographing kids is usually to get down to their level (unless you’re going for a particular angle – more in upcoming lessons.) Also be careful of background distractions. That yellow highlighter pen draws the eye away from the main topic of the photo – your son and his pie eating endeavours.
* Image 2: The focus appears to be a little bit out on this one. When photographing people the point of sharpest focus should always be the eyes. Even if they’re closed. The eyes in this image look a little soft. Again more coming up.
* Image 4: The fence line is not straight and for me that distracts from the symmetry you like. You could do a crop and straighten in your photo editing system to easily fix that.
All of these images are good story telling images and lovely memories for you to treasure.
All in all a really good job and I look forward to seeing lots more,

Hi again. I checked your user manual and there is a section (page 82 in the manual I downloaded) on AF modes (auto focus modes). You have a few options you should have a play with including Continuous and Tracking which look like similar to the Continuous and Automatic that are described in the lesson.